The global Far Right uses its opponents’ keywords to present itself. All over the world, it borrows, transforms, and appropriates key concepts and terms associated with its political adversaries, deploying them both to oppose those adversaries and to introduce itself to voters and supporters. This practice is central, first and foremost, to the mainstreaming and normalization of far-right ideas and organizations, which has expanded the Far Right worldwide since the early 2000s. The gradual drift of once-marginal positions into the political mainstream, the softening of radical edges, and the strategic embrace of democratic procedure are all dynamics that have helped a wide variety of far-right movements gain respectability, legitimacy, and, therefore, popularity across continents.Footnote 1
Mainstreaming and normalization operate on a two-way street. On the one hand, traditional or mainstream parties have increasingly adopted themes central to far-right platforms—insecurity and punitive justice, immigration and border control, welfare chauvinism, exclusionary national identity, cultural protectionism—in diluted but recognizable form.Footnote 2 The motivations are usually strategic: to recover voters lost to the Far Right by offering a more democratically palatable version of their politics, or to outflank the Left by hardening the terms of public debate and delegitimizing more progressive positions. They also reflect cultural and political changes taking place within traditional right-leaning parties. In both cases, the effect tends to be the same: it legitimizes the Far Right further and contributes to its success. Research reveals that such accommodative policy shifts by mainstream parties tend to catalyse voter transfers from mainstream to radical-right parties.Footnote 3
On the other hand, far-right movements have also appropriated key terms and themes from their opponents—progressives, liberals, and conservatives alike. This is the topic of our issue. Its main argument is that semantic hijacking is not a recent tactic of the global Far Right, but a defining feature of its long history.
To be sure, political keywords are not fixed properties, and it would be a mistake to think of them as belonging to any one political-ideological group more than any other. Using a rival’s preferred keyword is the norm in political discourse, a rhetorical practice regularly exercised by the Left, Right, and Centre alike. An opponent’s keyword may be employed for purely instrumental reasons, or it may stem from a genuine belief that they have a legitimate claim to these terms. The two often coexist, as a borrowed vocabulary takes on a life of its own within the movement that adopted it. It is not our task to adjudicate which appropriations are sincere and which are cynical. Rather, it is to ask what the Far Right does with these keywords and why—recognizing the variety of motives and uses at play—and to understand how hijacking changes the Far Right itself and reshapes the politics around it.
Nevertheless, in this issue, we opted to use the term “hijacking” to draw attention to a far-right rhetorical strategy in which the use of such keywords blurs boundaries, normalizes a radical agenda, and fundamentally challenges conventional mainstream political discourse. By hijacking, we refer to the process by which far-right actors adopt the vocabulary of their opponents—liberalism, feminism, anti-racism, democratic pluralism, among others—while systematically bending it towards antithetical ends. What is hijacked, in other words, is not merely a word or phrase but the concept behind it, with its normative charge and history—keywords, in Raymond Williams’ sense, as sites of conceptual struggle.Footnote 4
We contend that when the Far Right hijacks keywords from its opponents, a semantic inversion of those terms occurs. Keywords borrowed from the Left or the progressive side, for instance, are emptied of their emancipatory substance for two essential purposes: to contest the political ownership of these concepts and to neutralize the progressive projects they were forged to advance. Inclusionary keywords thus become instruments—or part of a language—of exclusion.
Similar processes occur when the Far Right borrows terms from the conservative side: “tradition,” for instance, is stripped of its Burkean sense of gradual, inherited wisdom, and refitted to denote a fixed civilizational or racial essence under siege, demanding not patient stewardship but militant restoration. When the Far Right presents itself as conservative and traditionalist, it advocates a revolutionary ethos set on dismantling the very institutions conservatives revere.
In this perspective, these terms are no longer the exclusive property of the traditions that forged them; they become contested terrain, an opportunity for the Far Right to mimic not only its adversaries’ discourse but also their strategy. The best-known and most effective example is the far-right deployment of the free speech argument. The claim is that progressive institutions, with their “speech codes,” seek ideological conformity and apply free speech standards asymmetrically and disingenuously. The Far Right’s free speech discourse, to be sure, has no interest in the perspectives of outgroups (ideological or otherwise), and is instead tied to an exclusionary, illiberal concept of Sovereignty. And yet, the appeal of the far-right argument reflects the Left’s inability to persuade others of its concept of free speech.
This being said, hijacking is not always successful. The limitations of the Far Right’s use of this strategy are, in fact, just as interesting as its successes; it does not always win, and on some fronts, it remains genuinely weak. The best-documented case perhaps is the European Nouvelle Droite’s attempt to hijack anti-racism: from the late 1970s, Alain de Benoist and GRECE appropriated the Left’s “right to difference” (droit à la différence) to argue that cultures must be kept separate (ethnopluralism)—a hijack intercepted and renamed when Pierre-André Taguieff exposed it as “differentialist racism,” a counter-label that stuck.Footnote 5 Far-right “green nationalism” did not succeed either in dislodging the green parties’ ownership of ecology, and most far-right parties retreated into climate scepticism.
As this issue demonstrates, the list of hijacked keywords is extensive and, taken together, has the potential to reshape how the ideological contours of the Far Right are understood. The following sections illustrate how this process unfolds.
1. Hijacking across the board
Historically, conservatives have been the first target of far-right hijacking. For long, conventionally conservative keywords, such as “tradition,” “family values,” “patriotism,” “heritage,” “civilization,” and in some cases “faith,” have been appropriated by the Far Right not for the conservative purpose of preserving the past, but to construct a new, imagined one, mobilized in the service of a radical and often violent future. Writing at the tail end of the McCarthy era, Richard Hofstadter wrote in the 1950s about “the pseudo-conservative revolt,” whose followers “have little in common with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism in the classical sense of the word, and they are far from pleased with the dominant practical conservatism of the moment as it is represented by the Eisenhower Administration.”Footnote 6 In more recent times, the Far Right rejected the conservative appreciation of existing institutions while often presenting itself as conservative. Project 2025, for example, with its deep state theory, is titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.”Footnote 7
But ideologically, the Far Right is well situated to venture beyond conservatism, and co-opt left-wing slogans as well. This aspect concerns the Far Right’s long-held self-understanding as being “neither left nor right,” as a “Third Way,” or, at the very least, as a “New Right.”Footnote 8 In addition to the long history of right-wing anticapitalism (e.g., National Syndicalism), our issue highlights the less fully analysed use of quasi-liberal keywords (e.g., various individual rights) and quasi-radical ones (e.g., decolonization).
The appropriation of left-wing vocabulary becomes especially visible during the Fourth Wave breakthrough of the global Far Right, that is, in the twenty-first century. This phase of the far-right expansion, defined by mainstreaming and normalization, has seen various leaders, such as Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, and Viktor Orbán in Europe, adopt the Left’s anti-imperialist and anti-globalization vocabulary, presenting the European Union, NATO, and international institutions as colonial impositions on sovereign peoples.Footnote 9
Far-right parties across Europe—particularly in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and France—have also redeployed feminist language to target Muslim communities, framing restrictions on immigration as a defence of women’s rights, gender equality, and LGBTQIA+ freedoms against a culturally incompatible “other.”Footnote 10 Similarly, gay rights have been weaponized as a marker of Western civilizational superiority—what Jasbir Puar terms “homonationalism.”Footnote 11 In India, Hindu nationalists have appropriated the slogan of “Nari Shakti” (women’s power) to both celebrate women’s emancipation and express devotion to the Hindu motherland (see Amrita Basu’s contribution in this issue).
During the pandemic, anti-vaccine and COVID-restriction movements in the United States protested mask mandates and other “freedom-curtailing impositions,” rebranding their movement as a fight for “bodily autonomy”—a term borrowed directly from feminist discourse (see Jonathan Obert’s contribution in this issue). More recently, the US Department of War decided to make flu shots for the military optional, in the name of religious freedom.Footnote 12
Similar inversions occur with liberal or progressive movements and figures. The MAGA movement has deployed the language of civil rights and anti-discrimination, invoking equality before the law, the harm of racial preferences, and the ideal of a colourblind society to frame DEI programmes themselves as a form of racism, thereby appropriating the moral vocabulary of the very movement it opposes to dismantle its institutional legacy. It routinely cites Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington speech, in which he expressed his dream that his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”Footnote 13 This quote is decontextualised to argue that any race-conscious policy—affirmative action, DEI, reparations—betrays King’s vision, effectively conscripting him as a posthumous opponent of the civil rights movement’s own institutional achievements.Footnote 14
The list goes on, including key terms usually associated with the Left and, more broadly, the liberal side: freedom and civil liberties, free speech and anti-censorship, social justice and anti-establishment protest, anti-racism and identity.
In short, what the Far Right takes differs by source tradition: from conservatism (tradition, family, and faith), from liberalism (rights, freedom, free speech, and bodily autonomy), and from the radical Left (revolution and its violence, anti-imperialism, anti-elitism, decolonization, and Gramscian strategy). Whom it borrows from most is context-dependent: it depends on the adversaries it faces and, above all, on the coalition it manages to take part in and sometimes dominate. This helps understand why conservatives tend to be the Far Right’s first target: they are the Far Right’s most likely coalition partners.Footnote 15
In practice, when the Far Right uses a keyword of its opponents, it latches onto adjectives that are distinctly its own—such as nativist, hierarchical, authoritarian, or civilizational—so that the borrowed vocabulary and the native epithets are made to appear inseparable. Free speech is yoked to national sovereignty against globalist censorship; individual rights are anchored to civilizational identity against a culturally incompatible “other”; bodily autonomy is folded into a defence of the nation against the encroaching state.
Hijacking, therefore, has a floor. The Far Right appropriates the vocabulary of inclusion everywhere except on its core commitments, where its language remains stubbornly its own. That core is best understood less as a fixed object than as a set of thought patterns: social hierarchy and vertical authority, majoritarianism, nativism and culturalism, and a conspiratorial mindset that scapegoats outgroups and incriminates the existing rules of the political game as illegitimate. Its exclusionary minimum is the defence of the rights and privileges of an ingroup—whether a majority or a minority—at the expense of an outgroup. The pattern of what is and is not hijackable thus reveals this constant ideological core.
These pairings serve two purposes at once. First, it allows the Far Right to claim a more authentic custodianship of the hijacked term than its opponents since the term is now presented as fully realized only when grounded in the nation, the people, or tradition—categories the Far Right claims to own or understand better than its rivals. Second, it provides rhetorical cover for the Far Right’s historically fraught vocabulary: terms like nation, purity, or order, burdened with associations of exclusion and violence, are laundered through their proximity to liberal or progressive keywords that carry broad democratic legitimacy. The hijacking thus runs in both directions: it does not merely launder the Far Right’s borrowing; it also launders its own.
2. Mimicking institutional infrastructure
This semantic borrowing does not appear in a void. To stake their claims in the semantic terrain, far-right movements and parties worldwide rely on a network of organizations that is expanding rapidly. The American Far Right has built networks of think tanks, legal and other advocacy organizations (most notably the Federalist Society, The Alliance Defending Freedom in the United States, Turning Point), and campus-organizing structures that directly mirror the infrastructure the Left built over decades. Members of these organizations deploy the Left’s own vocabulary of rights, equality, and anti-discrimination to dismantle its legal legacy in court.
For example, early MAGA strategist and political activist Steven Bannon has called for the systematic placement of movement cadres in courts, school boards, local government, and the media—a strategy he has openly described on his War Room podcast as the need to “seize the institutions” and then “purge them.” This language echoes, though it did not originate in, the New Left’s “long march through the institutions,” a phrase coined by German student activist Rudi Dutschke in 1967.
In his interviews, Bannon frequently invokes Gramsci’s grammar of hegemony, the language of “cultural revolution,” “consciousness-raising,” and “movement building,” transplanting this distinctively left-wing category into a reactionary project.Footnote 16 All over the world, far-right ideologues have appropriated the Gramscian concept of cultural hegemony and use his writing as a playbook to advance their own cultural and political project.Footnote 17 This is not merely a borrowing of words, but of the concept itself, and the strategies that can be derived from it.
This is a global pattern. In Hungary, the Orbán regime created the Danube Institute and the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a Hungarian education and training institute closely tied to Viktor Orbán’s government and the “illiberal democracy” worldview that it promotes. In Israel, the Kohelet Policy Forum was created as a right-wing/conservative think tank in 2012. It played an outsized role in shaping Israeli policy debates, most notably the judicial overhaul efforts pushed in 2023 by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. In India, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh encouraged the creation of new think tanks, such as the India Foundation and the Vivekananda International Foundation, which promote a Hindu nationalist worldview on domestic and foreign policy.
Paralleling the reality of far-right coalitions in political life, these institutions strive to engage mainstream academics and intellectuals in far-right intellectual coalitions. This engagement goes beyond the confines of the right per se and contributes to the normalization and mainstreaming. It also serves as a conduit for the transnationalisation of the Far Right as visiting scholars, funders, and guest speakers, who become nodes linking otherwise disconnected national movements into a circulating network. These institutions thus become essential to the diffusion of the Far Right’s semantic hijackings themselves. What circulates through these networks is not only personnel and funding, but also hijacked vocabularies themselves: femonationalist framings travel outward from Western Europe, “illiberal democracy” is exported from Budapest, and the Gramscian playbook moves from the French Nouvelle Droite to Bannon.
The phenomenon analysed in this issue is therefore truly a global one, with both ideological and institutional dimensions, and a considerable past. It goes well beyond what Krause, Cohen, and Abou-Chahid have called the Far Right’s “strategy of superficial moderation,” or what the French Far Right and far-right scholars alike have termed dédiabolisation: the strategic effort by far-right movements and parties to shed the stigma of extremism and present themselves as legitimate, reasonable, even progressive political actors.Footnote 18 To appear unthreatening, it helps to speak the language of those it threatens.
We argue here that framing semantic appropriation purely as a normalization strategy, however accurate, risks underestimating it. Semantic hijacking is not merely a communicative tactic deployed in the service of electoral ambition. It is, we contend, constitutive of what the Far Right actually is as a political form.
The Far Right, as a movement (or, more precisely, as a family of movements), has always resisted a clean categorical definition. The Far Right is not simply the end of a linear political spectrum. It borrows promiscuously from the Left, from the critique of capitalism, from communitarian critiques of liberal individualism, from ecological thought, and from anti-imperialist discourse. Its populist wing positions “the people” against corrupt elites in a register that can, at times, sound disquietingly close to the Left’s own idioms.Footnote 19 Semantic appropriation, in this light, is not an add-on to the Far Right’s politics—it is an expression of the Far Right’s distinctive political logic, its particular way of inhabiting and distorting political space.
Maurice Bardèche, a French art critic and journalist better known as one of the leading exponents of neo-fascism and Holocaust denial in post-World War II Europe, explained in a text published in 1957 (“Le fascisme est-il dépassé?”) that “There are three essential characteristics of fascism: it is a socialist regime, it is a hierarchical regime, and it is a nationalist regime.”Footnote 20 Paraphrasing Drieu La Rochelle’s work and definition of fascism, historian Jean-Pierre Saidah explained that it:
would be a form of socialism that would take the best aspects of socialism, but add a spiritual dimension to it—the reconciliation of the left and the right, the possibility of pursuing left-wing policies with people on the right [...] who have reformed themselves or people on the left who have been brought into line with discipline.Footnote 21
This is also part of its appeal. The mimicry is not merely deceptive or strategic; it is generative. By speaking in borrowed languages, the Far Right creates genuine ambiguity. It attracts voters who might otherwise recoil from openly reactionary politics, and forces opponents into the uncomfortable position of policing language rather than debating substance.
We contend that making sense of the rise of the Far Right calls for a reconsideration not only of its present and future but also of its history. The contributions in this issue map this terrain across multiple national contexts and political vocabularies, attending to both the strategic and the constitutive dimensions of semantic inversion. Together, they make the case that to understand far-right normalization, we must first understand what the Far Right is doing to “our” words.
While the far-right use of its opponents’ keywords is nothing new—some of the articles gathered here address episodes more than a century old—the contemporary Far Right has used such hijacking with unusual effectiveness to mobilize, mainstream, and normalize its radical agenda.
This effectiveness is historically specific. In the post-1945 world, far-right actors were pariahs: the anti-fascist consensus, anchored in a Cold War led by two ostentatiously anti-fascist empires, left them no place, and even Klan-adjacent Southern Democrats or the early BJP in India remained marginal players rather than contenders. The breakthrough came with the end of the Cold War, when that consensus dissolved.
There is thus a distinctive character to the current moment for two essential reasons. First, the media environment, as social media rewards precisely the ambiguity hijacking produces: decontextualized phrases travel as memes, irony provides deniability, and platform virality favours the shock of inversion. Second, the transnationalisation of the far-right movement, which, while not new in itself, is taking new forms in today’s conditions through the institutional networks described above.
Here lies the significance and urgency of our issue. But this hijacking comes at a price for the Far Right in the form of inevitable internal rifts and disagreements. Note, for instance, how the MAGA coalition has been splitting, at least since 2025, over the question of antisemitism.Footnote 22 In France, some patriarchal catholic factions within the Far Right do not follow Marine Le Pen’s use of feminist vocabulary, rejecting it as inherently leftist and explicitly refusing to use it even instrumentally.
3. Why it matters: three takeaways from studying far-right hijacking
To conclude this introduction, we would like to offer three takeaways in the form of pleas to help refine or expand our understanding of the Far Right, and to propose ways to respond to it.
Our first plea is for a much more expansive imagination of the ideological contours of the Far Right. By virtue of its self-positioning as the “new” right, the Far Right, more than any other political actor, substantially defines its agenda by reappropriating keywords and concepts of its opponents. This is significant and relevant because the Far Right today forcefully rejects this designation. As the contributors to this issue show, the hijacking of liberal, conservative, and radical terms is not a new phenomenon. This, we argue, is not a marginal aspect of far-right ideology, but one of its constant, core attributes throughout its longer history. In other words, the Far Right always utilized its opponents’ keywords, and always will.
To be sure, monographs on specific far-right histories—such as the French protofascists of the Belle Époque, the Klan of the 1920s, or the Tea Party—have acknowledged such repurposing of political keywords. But they have, in our view, failed to define it for what it is: a necessary aspect of far-right ideology and agenda everywhere. Seeing this rhetorical move as a steady feature of the Far Right, we call attention also to its broader discursive impact. When the Far Right uses its opponents’ keywords to present itself, it effectively shapes how the mainstream can respond to it. In a word, semantic hijacking shapes both the Far Right and the mainstream.
Our second takeaway points to the vulnerability of liberal, radical, and conservative keywords. Many of the articles in this issue demonstrate that the Far Right effectively uses the political keywords of its opponents precisely when the latter—the ostensible “rightful owners” of these keywords—have either failed to persuade or failed to abide by their own proclaimed principles. The cases assembled here bear this out: the far-right free speech discourse discussed above gained traction where progressive institutions applied their own speech norms selectively; the colourblind citation of King persuades audiences whom defenders of race-conscious policy had ceased trying to persuade; and “bodily autonomy” proved easiest to seize where public health authorities preferred mandates to persuasion.
The appropriation by the Far Right, thus, is part of the price that liberals, radicals, and conservatives pay for their own blind spots and half measures. Instead of dwelling on the Far Right’s incoherence and contradictions, its opponents would do better to examine and correct their own, and work to restore their credibility as legitimate stewards of their keywords.
Our third and final takeaway is that hijacking, by definition, renders far-right coalitions vulnerable. While certain far-right actors—as this issue shows—employ some forms of feminist, philosemitic, or ecological discourse, these will remain hot-button issues for the Far Right more broadly and will ultimately divide it. Defenders of liberal democracy thus have a vested interest in engaging with the Far Right precisely on these issues, knowing that doing so will either expose far-right instrumentalisation of semantic inversions, or deepen far-right ideological fissures. In its use of hijacking, which, we have argued, is its necessary, constant feature, the Far Right unwittingly offers its opponents a remarkable weapon.
Author contribution
Conceptualization: A.G., G.V.; Writing - original draft: A.G., G.V.; Writing - review & editing: A.G., G.V.
Conflict of interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
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